Buck could get the most out of his athletes

This sort of thing may not even be allowed anymore, but John Buck had a recruiting angle he swore by.

“He stopped by the house one time,” said Mike Hadway, who ran for Buck at Spokane Community College in the mid-1970s, “and asked, ‘Can I look at Mike’s room?’

“I had all these pictures of runners, Jim Ryun and others, all over the wall, and he took a look around and said, ‘Yeah, I want him.’ He told me years later that you can always tell what a kid’s like by checking his room out.”

John Buck had a knack for getting the best out of his athletes – but he also understood it had to be in there in the first place.

This was true when he started the SCC track program from scratch and turned it into one of the nation’s best, and just as true years later when he supervised the lamentable final days of football at the Community Colleges of Spokane with just as much devotion. It was true when he was a young football coach at Ashland High School in Oregon and found himself a young gem of a quarterback named Sonny Sixkiller, and even when he took over the tennis team at CCS, mostly out of duty.

There was a quality to John Buck – tough, fair, down-to-earth – that endured all the way to early Friday morning when – with his wife, Melba, and children Brenda and Jay at his side – he finally succumbed to the cancer he’d battled for six years. He was 68.

The name alone gave you a sense of his roughhewn character. That he would finish practice to go tend the cows on his Colbert ranch lent an insight into what kept him in Spokane when, in fact, his recruiting energy and contacts and his technical track expertise would have allowed him to be successful anywhere, on any level.

But his real successes, inevitably, were one-on-one.

“I thought he really typified the community college coach – that might have been his best niche,” said CCS athletic director Maury Ray. “Because he appealed to all types. He could pull kids out of the cities – some of them dropouts – and those kids are school teachers and principals today, and then he could work just as well with a kid from Mead driving a Cadillac.”

Indeed, on his last CCS football team, kids from Cheney started alongside Samoans from south Seattle, and a farm-boy quarterback from Idaho shared a backfield with a tailback from deep in New Orleans. And what bothered Buck the most when the school abandoned the sport was that one more avenue leading all of them toward productive lives was being closed.

That and the fact that he’d seen his friend, Bob Everson, trudge out to practice between chemotherapy treatments, keeping the program alive.

Buck’s passing is an eerie, heartbreaking time for the CCS athletic family, where bonds are forged over decades. He took over the football program when cancer claimed Everson at the age of 50. Buck’s successor as track coach, Duane Hartman, was a cancer victim three years ago, as was Scott Foxley, another football staffer who also coached baseball and women’s basketball, before him.

Ray, especially, is touched, because his history with Buck goes back 38 years to when both coached at Ashland – and when Buck, a native of Reardan and a graduate of Davenport High School, wound up towing him along to do graduate work at Idaho State and Utah, and finally to SCC.

“He could talk anyone into anything,” Ray laughed.

At Ashland, that meant getting kids suited for football who might not normally turn out – helping level the field somewhat against larger schools in the same league.

But sometimes it was show and not just sell.

“He was one of those guys who would get in and do it with you,” said Sixkiller, the legendary UW quarterback who was just a skinny hopeful when he first encountered Buck. “He’d say, ‘When I tell you to run through a hole like this you – dang it, just gimme a helmet’ – and he’d get in there in shorts and a T-shirt, the whistle behind his neck and run through and just let guys hammer him.

“He was tough. But you ask any player – you’d rather play for a guy who’s hard on you but who is fair to everybody and brings out the best in you. I know he did that for me and for many others.”

But that was even more evident on the track at SCC, where his first team finished second and then started a run of 10 straight NWAACC championships – once by 151 points. Other times he was sure that injuries or ineligibilities would bring the streak to an end, but he’d always seem to have a cadre of quarter-milers who would come up big in the 200 and 800 and mile relay, too, and save the day.

He also won four cross country championships before turning the distance runners over to Max Jensen – once with a perfect score of 15.

“And he was mad some other team’s No. 1 runner finished ahead of his No. 7,” Ray said.

He wasn’t just doing it with superstars, either.

“We had some guys who’d been state champs but some of them didn’t pan out,” said Steve Kiesel, who now coaches at Rogers. “In most cases, his success stories were guys who were around the edge – he’d take guys and somehow convince us that we weren’t just JC runners. We ran against the best on the West Coast and held our own.”

And, again, the bigger successes came off the track.

“At a decisive time in my life, he made me grow up,” said Hadway, who has had some coaching success himself at Ferris. “I was going down the wrong road a little and he called me into his office and chewed me out and told me I had to prove myself to get back on the team. And when I did, he welcomed me back.

“He knew how to get kids to respond and grow.”

Hadway wonders if Buck’s direct and demanding style would necessarily play with today’s athlete, but the truth is that John Buck was admired and loved for the way he’d give it up as well as dish it out.

“When I won the conference my freshman year in the 800,” Kiesel remembered, “he gave me a bear hug that just about broke my ribs. That meant so much to me – that feeling of ‘you did good for the old man.’

“I can feel that bear hug to this day.”